Canberra Cakeup #1

Today a bunch of fellow Canberra bloggers and I attended the first ever Canberra Cakeup, run by the Canberra Cake Club (a group of bloggers who were jealous of Perth’s Cake Club decided to organise one for Canberra – good call!).

The Cakeup was held at Stripey Sundae, Gold Creek – fitting considering the theme for today’s meet up was ‘ice cream’.

I decided to go abstract for my baking challenge, mainly because I feared anything made with actual ice cream would melt in our current climate, and also because I thought I’d be smart and think outside the box. I decided to make a three tier Neapolitan layer cake, inspired by my favourite ice cream as a kid. Not so smart, because someone else made the same thing and it looked waaaay better than mine. Oh well. I was pretty proud of my creation, considering I’m not much of a baker – the presentation wasn’t very impressive, but the cake itself tasted pretty good (if I do say so myself).

The Cakeup was really cool – a bunch of food nerds oooing and ahhhing over each other’s creations, and boy were there some awesome cakes! You can see some of the other baker’s creations on the Canberra Cake Club twitter page.

Here is the recipe for the cake I made:

(Note: I found this recipe online, copied it in to an email and sent it home to myself. I didn’t write down the name of the blog I got it off, because I am an amateur – if this is your recipe, please let me know and I shall credit accordingly)

3-4tsp of rose syrup
0.5-1tsp of red food colouring (depending on the depth of colour you wish to achieve)
1tbsp of milk.

Chocolate sponge

2 tablespoons cocoa powder

To start, preheat oven to 180 celcius. Cream butter (at room temperature) and sugar together until fluffy, then your going to add 2 eggs with 100g of flour each time until incorporated into the mixture, with the last 100g of flour add the baking powder and blitz.

At this point I removed 1/3 of the mixture into two other separate bowls. Into one 1/3 of the mixture I added the ‘vanilla ingriedients’ as listed under vanilla sponge until incorporated. In to the second bowl I added two tablespoons of cocoa powder. In the third bowl I added the ‘rose ingriedients’ as above until incorporated fully. I’ used one cake tin for this, so I had to cook in 3 seperate batches but you dont need to do this if you have 3 of the same tin.

Fill each tin with 1/3 of the mixtures (or if you’re in my shoes, fill one tin three times) and bake for 25-30 minutes until a cake tester comes out clean or when touched the sponge springs back. Your going to need a lot to cover the whole cake outside and between each layer so be prepared.

After each cake comes out leave to cool on a wire rack until completely cooled then remove the baking paper and place on the surface you will be using to carry the cake. It will be quite hard to move from one surface to another after iced and decorated. I levelled out each of the three cake bits by slicing the top off to create a flat surface – this should be done once the cake is cooled, as it is easier to cut. I then built my tiers: I started with rose, then vanilla, and finally chocolate on top (with a layer of cream in between each layer). When finished, cover the whole cake in cream (or icing if you wish) and decorate with whatever you want, its entirely up to you at this stage – I used chocolate sprinkles for the ‘ice cream’ theme.

Here are some photos of the end result:

For more information about the Canberra Cake Club, find them on Facebook or Twitter.